Autobiography and Decolonization: Modernity, Masculinity, and the Nation-State (Wisconsin Studies in Autobiography)

ISBN: 0299226107

Author: Holden, Philip

Condition: New

Philip Holden reveals deeply gendered connections between the writing of individual lives and of the narratives of nations emerging from colonialism. Autobiography and Decolonization is the first book to give serious academic attention to autobiographies of nationalist leaders in the process of decolonization, attending to them not simply as partial historical documents, but as texts involved in remaking the world views of their readers.Holden examines Mohandas K. Gandhis An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth, Marcus Garveys fragmentary Autobiography,Joseph Ephraim Casely Hayfords Ethiopia Unbound, Lee Kuan Yews The Singapore Story, Nelson Mandelas Long Walk to Freedom, Jawaharlal Nehrus An Autobiography, and Kwame Nkrumahs Ghana:The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah.Holden argues that these examples of life writing have had significant influence on the formation of new, and often profoundly gendered, national identities. These narratives constitute the nation less as an imagined community than as an imagined individual. Moving from the past to the promise of the future, they mediate relationships between public and private, and between individual and collective stories. Ultimately, they show how the construction of modern selfhood is inextricably linked to the construction of a postcolonial polity.